Analyst Insights: How Pentaho BI 4 is changing the game for SMB companies

Recently I had the pleasure to speak with Albert Pang, a veteran of the application market space with more than 25 years of experience and the founder of Apps Run The World. In our conversation, centered on Pentaho BI 4, we discussed the use of business intelligence by the casual business user – something that in the past has been impossible due to the highly technical nature of business intelligence deployments.

In his recent blog, Business Analytics for the Masses, Pang depicts this problem and describes how it has impacted the SMB market. He explains how highly technical BI tools worked as a roadblock for SMB companies that did not have intensive IT resources to allocate to BI projects — something that independent BI vendors in the market (Pentaho, Tableau, and Qliktech) have realized and leveraged as an opportunity to improve the BI market.

Pang goes further by saying “Pentaho, which has made its name in the open-source BI marketplace, introduced Pentaho BI 4 Enterprise Edition in June. One of the key targets is non-technical business users who can use the new product to create highly formatted, interactive reports with zero training or involvement from the IT department.”

Part of our mission at Pentaho is to make it easy and cost effective for SMB companies to reap the same benefits historically only obtainable by blue-chip companies. With Pentaho BI 4, we’ve extended this mission to encompass the casual business users too. As this “New wave of BI” becomes more pervasive, more users than ever before will look to harness BI for their everyday business use. Pentaho is already seeing this effect with our customers including Loma Linda University Healthcare, SpecSavers, Centro, and others.